


Little Sister

by bellabonbon



Category: Dear Evan Hansen - Pasek & Paul/Levenson
Genre: Angst, Birthdays, Drugs, Mentions of Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 15:24:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11293434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellabonbon/pseuds/bellabonbon
Summary: Eighteen is supposed to be one of the biggest milestones of her life, but it really just means she's officially outgrown him.Her big brother is now younger than her, and she hates it. That was never supposed to happen.





	Little Sister

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own any of these characters.

Zoe wakes up on the morning of her eighteenth birthday consumed in guilt. 

The guilt, of course, causes her to feel bitterness, which causes her to feel shame, which causes her to feel anger. And it’s just one big fucking circle of emotion. Isn’t it always, though?

She gets dressed and goes downstairs for breakfast, and both of her parents are at the table waiting for her. They don’t normally do family breakfast- haven’t in a long time- but apparently they are making an effort today. So instead of calling them out on the pointlessness of the gesture, she does her best to not be a bitch and just sits down in her usual chair. Her mom has made way too much food, of course, but no one mentions it. 

No one mentions that she should cut her usual recipes down by a fourth because it’s been over a year, and if she hasn’t done that yet, she’s probably not going to.

Instead, Zoe just helps herself to some of the pancakes and fruit and tries not to think about all the food that will inevitably be thrown away after the meal. Her dad stays off his phone for once and tries to engage them in conversation. He asks where Zoe wants to go for dinner and tries to make a joke about how she can’t commit any crimes now that’s an adult. She forces a smile because she thinks he probably needs it. Her mom smiles, too, but it’s that strained smile that’s accompanied by those red-rimmed eyes that they’ve all just accepted as the new normal. They all eat breakfast, and everyone does their best to ignore the empty chair at their table. It’s part of the reason why they don’t sit here a lot anymore, but when they do, everyone makes an effort to avoid it. Sometimes Zoe just wishes they would get rid of it. Just turn their four top into a three top. 

She never suggests this, though, because she knows her mother would cry.

When she gets in her car for school, she turns her music up too loudly and tries to settle on a single emotion. She keeps wavering between guilt and anger, and she looks to her right at the empty passenger seat and thinks about the last time he was in here. It was the first day of school last year, and she begrudgingly drove them both to school because that was somehow her role and responsibility as the younger sister. They argued on the short drive to school because he was in a terrible mood, which made her own mood terrible. She told him he was ruining the first day of school, and he told her that no normal people were actually _excited_ to go to school. So obviously she told him that he was the _last_ person who needed to be lecturing on what the definition of “normal” was. Then he tried to light a cigarette in her car, and she flipped out and threatened to tell their parents, which just made him roll his eyes and ask why she thought he gave a shit. He didn’t light the cigarette, though, just called her a bitch and sat silently for the rest of the trip. They were almost late to school on the first day, and she tried to ditch him immediately for a whole lot of reasons. She wasn’t fast enough to miss him shoving Evan to the ground in retaliation to something Jared said, though. She went off on him for that, and he told her to shut the fuck up. She left him to his own devices after school and didn’t offer to give him a ride home.

The next time she saw him, he was in a casket.

So she settles on guilt. At least for now. She drives herself to school and doesn’t look at the passenger seat anymore. She’s entertained the idea of asking for a new car, specifically so she won’t have to keep reliving that last morning. She has almost asked several times, but she’s always stopped herself, mostly because she knows she would actually get it. She knows she can get whatever she asks for. She’s never really had a lot of problems getting what she wants. She would have _no_ problems now. If she asked for a car, her parents would just ask what kind, and then they’d take her car shopping. She knows that’s not normal. She knows normal kids don’t just get to ask for something like that and have it handed right to them. But she’s not normal. Her family’s not normal. 

She wants to be normal.

School is terrible. It always is. She hated middle school because the kids were horrible. By the time she got to high school, she had mostly learned to ignore it and just focused on her small group of friends, and school was a little more tolerable. Last year, she suddenly turned into the most popular girl in school- at least for a little while. It turned awful pretty quickly, and she started hating school again. Things aren’t as crazy this year, but she spends most of her time avoiding human contact, even from the few friends who didn’t turn on her last year when things got really bad.

She still hears whispers sometimes. Not a lot. But sometimes. People whisper about him. They whisper about all the reasons they think he must have done what he did. How it had to be her fault. Or her parents’ fault. He never gets the blame. Never. People still think he was just some poor, lonely kid who loved trees and just wasn’t able to keep on living because he was in too much pain. 

For the most part, though, people just leave her alone. The online harassment has mostly stopped, probably because she’s closed all of her socials except Facebook, which is private. Nobody calls them and threatens them anymore. People don’t ring the doorbell in the middle of the night anymore- the high-tech security system obviously is obviously intimidating enough to keep the hecklers away. It’s taken long enough, but things are slowly dying down. 

She goes to her first class and sits in the corner with her head down. She doesn’t care what Mr. Perry is talking about. She hasn’t cared all year. Her grades reflect this, but she doesn’t care. It’s her senior year. It doesn’t matter.

Her dad says otherwise. He’s noticed- shockingly- and he’s made a point to bring it up every couple of weeks, constantly asking how her grades are, if they’re coming up, what they can do to help her out. Like she’s stupid or something. Like they can just buy her a tutor and suddenly make her care. She’s not stupid. She just doesn’t _care_.

She has a couple of friends in second period, and they try to act all happy for her birthday. She tries to force a smile and pretend like she’s not drowning in guilt at the fact that despite the fact that eighteen is supposed to be one of the biggest milestones of her life… 

It really just means that she’s officially outgrown him.

He’ll be seventeen forever. Her older brother is now younger than her. She hates it. That’s not supposed to happen. And she hates it.

She didn’t like it when she turned seventeen, just a couple of weeks after his first missed birthday. Nobody felt like celebrating. Everything was too fresh and too hard, and she turned seventeen with barely any notice. She noticed, though, because she didn’t like the way they were suddenly the same age. They’d always been so close in age, but never the _same age._ And she didn’t like it.

But it wasn’t as bad as this.

She texts her dealer while she’s in English and makes plans to meet him after sixth period. She still thinks it’s a little weird that she has _a dealer_ because that was never her thing. That was never supposed to be her life. But none of this was supposed to be her life, so what does it matter?

And anyway, it’s not like she’s an addict. It’s just pot. Usually. And not even a lot. She’s not like him. She doesn’t need to be high to even remotely function. She doesn’t steal her mom’s pills or buy Oxy off that one weird kid that graduated three years ago but is somehow still always around. She just likes to smoke a little bit every now and then when things are feeling too much. 

She won’t go through all the fucked up shit that her head sometimes tries to tell her. Like how she never even thought about smoking pot until she found a tiny forgotten baggie one day when she was helping her mom go through some clothes to donate. She slipped the bag into her pocket while her mom was trying not to cry over a pair of jeans. It took forever for her to get to the point where she could even look through his stuff, much less give any of it away. Zoe wasn’t going to set it back by pointing out the drugs she uncovered.

She took the baggie out later when she was alone in her own room, and she stared at it for a really long time. She didn’t smoke it. It’s still hidden in a shoebox in the back of her closet- the same box she used to hide anything remotely valuable in when he was alive and in the habit of stealing from her room because their dad decided to cut him off once the drugs got too out of control. 

She doesn’t really need to hide things anymore, but she still does. A few things anyway. That one bag of her brother’s weed. A copy of his obituary that she cut out after secretly buying an actual newspaper for that sole reason. A few hundred bucks she keeps on hand in case she ever actually gets up the guts to run away. And a three page hand-written letter that her first and only boyfriend shoved into her locker the morning after they slept together the first time because he was always a lot better at writing than at talking. 

But finding that little bag of pot set it off. It wasn’t hard to find a dealer at school. Zach was probably his dealer, too, but she’s never asked. She just wanted to try it, so she did. And even though she didn’t really feel anything at all the first time, she still tried it again. And again. She had to teach herself because none of her friends smoked, and she wasn’t emo enough to go make a bunch of new stoner friends or something. The only person she knew who could actually help her was dead. So she just learned by experimenting and choking a lot. And also Google. Google helped a lot. And eventually she got the hang of it and decided it was pretty chill. 

So now she smokes sometimes. It’s not like it’s a big deal.

So that’s how she spends the afternoon of her eighteenth birthday. She meets Zach and skips her last class to drive to the park. It’s like 2 o’clock on a Thursday, so there aren’t a lot of people around. She’ll smoke in her car if she’s really fucking desperate, but she figures the park is empty enough right now that she can hide out under the trees at the duck pond and be discreet enough. She has some papers hidden in her middle console, and she rolls before she gets out of the car to cut back on any possible attention she might bring to herself. Then she grabs her lighter and her phone and takes off for the pond.

It’s relaxing out here. Quiet. Nice. The weed helps obviously, but she feels calm out here under these trees. She watches the few ducks that are hanging out and wonders where the others are. There are usually a lot more than this out here, but she figures they must be wandering somewhere. When she was little, she used to be scared of them. Of birds in general. She remembers one time when she was like five, and they came out to this park. She wanted to stay on the playground far away from this pond and all its birds. He told her she was a baby and then told her that ducks were really fast and they could come get her on the swings and eat the toes off her feet because she was wearing sandals. She cried, and their mom got mad and put him in time out. But he didn’t care because he scared her and made her cry, and time out was worth it for that.

She thinks that’s probably about the time she got over her fear.

It doesn’t take long for her mind to start clearing, and she feels peaceful and spaced out. She stubs out the joint and decides to save the rest for later. She’s lucky that it doesn’t take much to get her high. Or at least get her to the point where she can just fucking relax. She’s not one of those people who needs to like start seeing crap in slow motion or whatever. She just wants to release some pressure.

She lies down in the grass, her hair fanning out underneath her. She pulls her phone out and opens the Facebook app. She rarely even checks it. It’s the only account that she still has, but it’s also her lamest account. Most of her friends aren’t even on Facebook, and she really only has it so that her family has somewhere to get in touch with her/half keep up with her. She never posts anything, but she kept the account open anyway, even after she closed down all her others.

She has several notifications, a bunch of people wishing her a Happy Birthday. She doesn’t bother replying to or acknowledging any of the comments, but she does read them. The main one that catches her eye, though, is a post from her mom. Some heartfelt sappy post going on and on about how proud she is. About how she’s such a beautiful, special person and how it doesn’t seem possible that she’s eighteen. The rambling paragraphs are attached to an old picture of her in a purple dress and pigtails blowing out the candles on a Monsters, Inc. birthday cake. She’s standing in a chair, and he’s behind her, holding onto the back of it and looking around her. She doesn’t remember that party at all, but there are plenty of Monsters, Inc. toys in the basement to back up her momentary obsession. She’s pretty sure he was kind of into it, too, because she remembers watching the DVD a ton when they were little.

Probably one of the last things they ever agreed on.

When the new one came out a couple of years ago, she got it from Redbox and thought he might sit down and watch it with her. She didn’t come out and ask or anything, but she made a point to announce that she was watching it that night while they were at the dinner table. She went straight from the table to the living room and slipped it into the Blu-ray player, making another announcement just in case it was missed the first time. He hung around for like two minutes, standing in the doorway of the living room and picking at the edge of his sleeve. He didn’t say anything, but when he looked up and caught her watching him, he just glared at her and then went upstairs and slammed his door. 

That’s all he ever did. Slam his door. She slammed hers a lot. She still slams her. He doesn’t. Obviously. Because he’s dead. Seventeen and dead.

She closes her eyes, wondering what he would think of her right now. About how she’s lying in the grass by the duck pond, slightly buzzed in the middle of the afternoon on her birthday. He should be at college now, but she figures he probably wouldn’t be. Not like he was too dumb for college or whatever, but his grades were really shitty. Which is stupid because he was always actually super smart, and when they were little, she used to hate the way he got straight A’s while she usually got B’s and C’s. Their mom would always tell him to help her. He’d be forced to help with her homework or help her study for tests, all stuff he’d already done and succeeded at. And she hated it because it made her feel like he was in charge of her or something, at least in charge of her homework. And she hated that. _She_ was the bossy one between them, and she hated the fact that he might have any sort of authority over her, even if it was something as stupid as checking her multiplication problems. She already resented the fact that he was a year older than her- she didn’t need him acting like her teacher, too.

But that all stopped when they were like eleven or twelve. Because he started refusing to help her do anything, and it didn’t matter anyway because his straight A’s started slipping to her usual B’s and C’s. And then eventually to C’s and D’s. And then pretty much just D’s, which is where he stayed until he decided he was done with school after the first day of his senior year. 

Done with school. Done with life. Done with everything.

She thinks she might be okay if he tried to help her with her homework now. Even though he probably wouldn’t. It doesn’t matter, though. He’s not here to help her with anything. But at least she can’t resent him for being older than her anymore.

“God.” She sits up and rubs at her eyes. She doesn’t know why this is bugging her so much. She shouldn’t be this messed up over a _birthday._ She’s pathetic.

She hangs out at the park for a couple of hours, long enough for her buzz to fade because there’s no way she can go home high. Her mom would literally have a fucking fit. She still has some fucked up notion that the drugs were his main problem and not some form of untreated bipolar disorder or some shit. Sure, the drugs weren’t great, and he _did_ have a real problem there, but she doesn’t think pot and an affinity for pills he wasn’t prescribed is what really made him think killing himself was the best option. She’s pretty sure he had a list of shit that needed diagnosing and treating- she’s pretty sure those things had a lot more to do with it than the drugs ever did. But her mom seems to like living in denial.

So no, Zoe can’t go home high because she’d be in rehab tomorrow. She has no doubt.

She doesn’t really want to go home at all, though. She knows her parents want to take her to dinner and do something to celebrate. She knows she’ll have to face them eventually, but she’s just not ready yet. So she drives to the mall instead.

She hates the mall. Really. She used to like it, back when she still had friends she wanted to hang out with. She used to come here a lot, even though hanging out at the mall was just as much about escaping her house as it was about shopping. She would do anything to avoid her house, especially when he was there. She still likes avoiding it, though, even though he’s not there. She just doesn’t usually do it in a way as clichéd as hanging out at the mall anymore. 

But she parks and goes in anyway. She doesn’t know what she wants, but she figures she’ll just look around, kill time before she eventually has to go home to her parents and their happy birthday wishes. She ends up at Forever 21 because that’s where she always ends up. Or at least where she always ended up when she used to come here. She doesn’t really need anything, but she finds herself browsing the racks of cheaply made dresses that never last more than a couple of washes. Her mom hates when she shops here, always tells her that it makes more sense to spend more for something that will actually last more than a month. 

Maybe her mother’s distaste for it is exactly the reason she keeps coming here.

She grabs an armful of stuff and takes it to the dressing room. She undresses and looks at herself in the full length mirror. She’s skinny. Maybe too skinny. She’s lost some weight, nerves or something probably. Whatever. She hates everything she tries on, but she still stuffs a shirt into her purse before putting her own clothes back on and heading back into the store.

She steals stuff. Sometimes. Probably more than she should, which she knows is dumb because she should never steal stuff. Nobody should steal, but people like her _especially_ shouldn’t steal. She has money. Plenty of it actually. And her parents give her more all the time. She also has a credit card that she doesn’t have to pay for. It makes no sense for her to shoplift a $15 crop top, but she does it. Just like she steals $8 lipsticks and $0.79 packs of gums. She just does it. She doesn’t know why. Two years ago, the thought would have never crossed her mind.

She doesn’t get caught. She never does, even though sometimes she wonders if that’s what she’s secretly hoping for. But she doesn’t. She just walks out of the store and down to the food court where she buys a pretzel and a large Diet Coke. She didn’t eat lunch, and she doesn’t realize she’s hungry until she starts scarfing the pretzel down. She still hasn’t told her parents where she wants to eat, but she figures she needs to start deciding. 

She also needs to go home.

When she pulls into her driveway fifteen minutes later, she sees that both of her parents’ cars are there, which means she has no hope of getting out of anything. She grabs her backpack out of the backseat, shoving the stolen shirt and the leftover pot into it before she gets out of the car and lets herself in through the front door. 

“Hi, honey.” Her mom comes out of the kitchen to smile at her, and Zoe tries to smile back because that’s what her mom needs. “How was your day?”

Zoe shrugs. “It was fine.” 

“Did your friends do anything special for you?” 

She’s interested. Always so interested now. Always trying to be involved and make an effort, despite the fact that Zoe spent sixteen years of her life wondering if her mom even knew she existed. She was never interested in her before. Always just in him. Always just concerned with what _he_ needed and how _he_ was feeling. Zoe was an afterthought at best.

Not anymore.

“Yeah, Hannah gave me this bracelet.” She holds up her wrist to show off the rope bracelet, hoping that’ll be enough to get her mom to leave her alone and stop asking questions about her day. 

Her mom just takes her arm and inspects her arm appreciatively like she’s looking at something from Tiffany’s and not something Hannah literally pulled off the Target clearance rack (seriously, the tag was still on it). Zoe just lets her, though, and kind of wishes that she was still at least a little bit buzzed. But she’s not.

She finally throws out a restaurant name because her mom asks her again what she wants to do, and even though it’s not exactly black tie, she should probably still change out of the jeans and flannel she wore to school. She escapes to her room to find something slightly more acceptable, but she’s mostly just glad to be by herself again.

She doesn’t know when she started hating the companionship of people. She’s never been a social butterfly- at least not since she was little- but she was never a loner, either. Now she just spends most of her day hoping that people don’t talk to her and enjoying the time she gets to spend alone in her car and in her bedroom. She feels like she’s slowly turning into him, even though she knows that’s ridiculous. She knows she’s not him, will never be him, doesn’t _want_ to be him. But it’s like suddenly all of the things she always hated about him and judged him for seem a lot more appealing.

The thought scares her, though, so she just grabs a dress out of her closet and throws it on, dropping her other clothes onto the floor because she’s too lazy to aim for the hamper.

She briefly thinks about smoking again, but she knows she can’t. Instead, she grabs the bottle of vodka she keeps hidden under her bed and takes a single shot. It won’t do anything for her, but maybe she can at least trick her mind into thinking the edge is slightly dulled. She likes the way her throat burns as she swallows it with no chaser. It gives her something to focus on, and she needs that.

She’s not a _bad kid-_ not a kid at all anymore, her mind reminds her annoyingly. But she does bad stuff. She smokes weed sometimes. She has _very minimally_ experimented with other drugs. She drinks sometimes. She skips class a lot. She’s had sex. She shoplifts more often than she’d like to admit. She lies to her parents nearly all the time.

He always used to call her a goody-goody and a suck up, and she wonders what he’d say now. If he’d call her a poser or think that she maybe wasn’t as lame as he always claimed she was. He’d probably still hate her.

She’d probably still hate him.

She looks at the wall they shared for more than a decade. She used to hate that wall. So did he. It was the focus of their battle zone. Who could annoy the other one more via that too-thin shared wall that held her dresser on one side and his bed on the other. They spent so much time banging on that wall, screaming at the other to turn music down or shut the fuck up. Sometimes she’d bang on his door if he was ignoring her. He banged on hers a lot, too. 

Sometimes it went too far. Sometimes he’d get so angry at her that he’d pound on her door and yank on it and rattle the whole doorframe. She always kept it locked, but sometimes she was terrified that the lock wouldn’t hold. Normally, she wouldn’t care if he managed to get in because she knew he’d just scream at her and call her a bunch of names he always called her anyway. But sometimes he was too angry, and sometimes she was really scared that he wouldn’t stop with just yelling at her. Those were the times she’d run into her closet, shoving shoes and clothes out of the way so that she could fold herself into the corner and hold the door closed as tightly as possible just in case he managed to get into her room. She didn’t trust him during those times, not when he was screaming that he would kill her or hurt her or whatever horrible things he could hurl at her through the thin wood of the door or the thin plaster of their shared wall. 

And she’d just stand in her closet and cry, wondering why she had to push him so far. Or wondering what the hell was wrong with him to make him act like that. And she just hated him. _So much._ She would wish bad things on him, stuff she didn’t have the balls to yell back at him, but she’d think it in her head. _Hope_ for bad things to happen to him. She doesn’t know if she really meant them, but she probably did. 

She hoped on more than one occasion that he would just die or disappear.

And then he did.

One year, five months, sixteen days. That’s how long it’s been. And every single day, she looks at that shared wall and regrets wishing those things. Some days, she misses him. Most days, she doesn’t. But she still wishes it didn’t happen. Not like that. She wishes he didn’t do that.

She thinks her anger is getting better. She was so mad at first. And then so hurt. Now she’s just more numb to it all. She still has moments, though, when her brain can’t make up its mind about how to feel. Like today, when she feels so guilty about what? Being born? It doesn’t make any sense, and she knows that. She didn’t ask to be born, and she didn’t ask to make it through eighteen birthdays. She shouldn’t feel _guilty._

But she’s supposed to be a little sister. That’s what she’s always been. She’s seen the hospital pictures, brand new and in a Little Sister onesie, tucked carefully into her mom’s arms, while he looked down at her in confusion from his own spot in their dad’s arms, Big Brother t-shirt on and pacifier in his mouth. Because he was just a baby, too. A baby, but a big brother.

But not anymore.


End file.
